Chapter III

The breakdown was at once so utter and so unexpected that it amazed Kinloch. He could not understand it. It was the last thing he expected from her. Up to this point she had shown such cool, masterful self-assurance, and, as he judged, such calculating selfishness, that he had been sure she was either a tough, middle-aged, hard-bitten woman of the world, or one of those modern young women who are without the least grain of tenderness, even for themselves. Hard she might be, but evidently she had her breaking point. As the man stood silent, feeling helpless in the face of this distress, the tinkle of a bicycle bell recalled him to action.

"Some one coming," he said quickly. "Pull yourself together."

Then going down on his knees beside a wheel, with his back to the road, he affected to be looking at some damage to the tyre; for it were well, he thought, if she could not control herself, to make it appear as if she had some cause for distress. While so engaged he heard the soft whir of wheels flitting past on the gritty lane. Only when he heard the bell again as the cyclist dropped down to the main road did he stand up.

"He stared hard at you," she whispered over the side.

"Who was it?"

"A policeman, a country policeman, on his round." It startled the man queerly to find himself so soon after the incidents of the previous night in contact with the police. But the ruse he had adopted to divert attention from himself to what he was doing pleased him.

"I pretended you had a puncture."

"Oh, dear," she cried, "no wonder he turned round to look at you. Didn't you notice the tyres are solid?"

His hand went out to be assured she spoke the truth. He had never heard of a solid tyred car till that moment.

"We had better push on," she said, throwing open the door. "This is a bad beginning."

"They can't possibly have heard yet," he argued.

"No, but when the news comes out that policeman will remember us."

Her voice was so full of foreboding that Kinloch was surprised.

"Oh," he said, with an attempt at reassuring her, "the thing may make a noise in Ealing, but after all--"

A strange sound cut him short. He could hardly believe his ears. She was laughing. Not that it had any mirth in it. He noted that. And it ended as abruptly as it began.

"What did you laugh at?" he asked sharply. "Seems to me you've not much to laugh at."

"No. But that wasn't laughing."

He became suspicious.

"It really happened at Ealing, didn't it?"

"Oh, yes."

"Well?"

"If--if--it would make a noise only in Ealing," she said with a sigh, as if to herself.

But he overheard.

"You go on"--he spoke almost gently--"I dare say you're not a bad sort, and I'm too dangerous for you to have on your hands."

"No. I can't leave you here."

There was a world of quiet decision in that utterance. But the man thought she spoke from mere impulsive sympathy, and had not calculated the dangers.

"My dear lady, look at me, and then look at yourself. What sort of a pair do we make--to sit together in a car? The difference must be a difference that would excite notice wherever we went."

"Then we must in some way reduce the difference, that is all. Leave you here to be caught by the police I dare not."

Kinloch stood awhile, his head still throbbing with pain, so that clear thought was impossible, trying to envisage the situation. As he hesitated a cry came from her.

"O God, there is the policeman coming back. I thought he would. Oh, be quick," she pleaded in an agony of dread.

Kinloch got somehow into the car, and she raced it up and shot away.

For about half an hour they ran on without further speech. He was afraid some word of his might unnerve her again. But from the turns and twists he knew they were among lanes with the main road far behind. After that she began, as it were, to breathe more freely. He sat wondering how it would all end, and was rather bewildered by the quick march of events.

"Where are you taking me now?" he asked at length.

There was no tremor in the voice that now replied:

"Where I had meant to go myself for a time--a queer lonely village on the top of this ridge. It's shut in with gates at either end, and has a village green--well, I suppose it's more of a common than a village green, for it's a mile long and has clumps of trees on it, and furze."

She appeared in fact to be talking to put him at his ease.

"And when we get there--what then?"

"There's a house--some one I know has a little bungalow which he uses only in summer. An old woman, a neighbour, has the key. It will be all right; she knows me. You can stay there for a few days to get well and to see what has happened--whether anything has been discovered. Not one soul need know you are there."

"What is this place called?" he asked.

She hesitated over her answer.

"Ah, you don't want me to know?"

She did not reply, so he added: "Never mind, I know it isn't many miles from Chichester."

She seemed to give a start of surprise at his shot, and after a moment said:

"Why do you think so?"

"From the bell striking six, and the time we took to reach the small town in which there was such a bell. Besides that, the way we've been going up and down among hills would tell me these hills can only be the Sussex downs."

After a moment she said:

"If you are wise you won't try to find out where you are."

The reply let him see exactly where he stood with her. Evidently he was to be told as little as possible. He nodded his understanding of that fact to himself. So, in spite of her earlier breakdown and her tears, she was now on her guard, with all her wits about her, and knew how to take full advantage of his want of sight.

Later, when they approached the village, she left him in a thicket a little way off the lane, and went on to interview the old woman who had charge of the house. It needed considerable trouble to fix things up, evidently, for she was away about two hours. When she came back she brought some food for him. The old woman was then getting the place ready. She had shown no surprise over the unexpected arrival. The doings of the town people--foreigners as they were called--were always odd, even when they were not altogether mad. Much more, while he ate, she told Kinloch, sitting beside him on the rug. Although she seemed to be talking for talking's sake, he noted that she did so warily all the same, for nothing to give him a clue as to where he was slipped out.

"What is this village called?" he asked, as if forgetting for the moment her previous reluctance to tell him.

"I call it Minnis," she said.

And he gathered from her tone that it was so called by no one else.

Another thing he noted: for all her volubility there were occasionally sudden, oddly abrupt silences. He could feel she was thinking hard. He thought she was troubled, nervous, strained. And in those uneasy silences from among the wood below there came the clear strokes of a woodman's axe.

It was, of course, impossible for him to enter the bungalow before darkness came. He must stay where he was till nightfall. So after she had slipped away again he had nothing to do to keep him from thinking. His thoughts went straight back to that room in Ealing. What had that man in the fur coat been up to to get himself blackmailed? Beaumont--it was unlikely that was his real name--the begging-letter writer in Rowton Street, had told him tales of that fashionable crime. Not that blackmail was Beaumont's own game; he hadn't got the nerve for it, he had admitted. Nothing paid better; but, unfortunately, it was dangerous, he said. Then another thing Beaumont said came back to Kinloch--that in almost all cases of blackmail there was sure to be a woman somewhere. A lady of high position, he had said, smacking his lips, whose reputation afforded the leverage necessary to extract substantial amounts. It was only in such cases, he asserted, that sufficient pressure could be applied. And as Kinloch filled a second pipe his mind turned to the woman in this case. Was this the woman? Something of what was afoot between the two men she must have known. But she came into the room just too late. That fog again, he thought. The man must have envisaged murder from the start, for he had carried a knife, and no man carries a knife capable of inflicting death at one stroke--Kinloch had heard the heavy sigh that follows the use of steel too often not to draw that inference--except with murder in his mind. Besides, his hand had gone into that pool of warm fluid in about a minute after the blow.

At this last remembrance he sat up in sudden apprehension, the match burning itself out over the unlit pipe. Had he left any traces of his presence there? The man who came prepared to do murder, thoughtfully choosing a noiseless knife rather than a revolver, _he_ was unlikely to scatter proofs of his own presence, or of his identity, around. But he himself could have had no such forethought; and it gave him a sudden qualm to remember he had left his stick in that fateful room.

No, decidedly, it would be safer to lie low for a time. Remote as the place was, newspapers would no doubt penetrate even there, and with safety he could hear what they contained from her. Meanwhile no one had seen them come there, and no one need see him enter the bungalow. So she had said. He was rather content to take the course she proposed, for he did want to know more about the case, and about this girl's part in it. His first dislike of her had passed away. She was not quite what he had first thought; and, anyway, he determined to see the thing through.

It was very cold lying among the damp trees on the northern slope of that ridge; but he had lain in worse places.

And it consoled him to remember that if the January day is raw it is also short.